Hard to gauge from a scan, but at first glance the color shade has a bit more red in it than I like, but that could be the scan. Also, the August 1864 cancel date is a bit late (assuming I am reading the date accurately).

The abysmal left-right centering is actually a point in its favor. If someone were to fake one, they likely would choose an imperf with better margins as a starting point.

With no known multiples discovered up to this point, it's a tough sell.

It's one of those stamps (like many of the part perfs) that if I found one in the wild without paying a premium for it, I'd be thrilled about the possbilities, but I certainly wouldn't put down retail money for one given the uncertainties and the possibilities of being bogus.

Ahh, both the joys and dangers of having something that is possibly "unique".

I have long found that "If someone were to fake one, they likely would choose an imperf with better margins as a starting point" argument somewhat bogus. It gets used a lot for both postage coils and revenue part perfs. If I were faking these I would make a certain number of them deliberately off center for just that reason, most people would be inclined to think they are good, and I would rather have 20% of a very big number then 80% of a very small one. If I had the stamp in front of me I would take 3 or 4 examples of the $1 inland exchange and start ling up the perfs. Comparing both sides on this example would prove nothing, sinc if both are fake they were created from the same device.

I'll bite. Barring blind perfs at the top, a perforating job or a misplaced short transfer in top sheet margin (of an imperf original), I'd say it's real. It does have the look of reperfing in spots on both sides, though.

EDIT: For high-end buyers, greed on the part of the forger and buyer says to make the best-looking copy possible, and only one or two, emphasizing its rarity. Now if the forger were mass producing these (20% of catalog! A bargain while they last!), passable ones would be made from any imperfs with two margins

Don't forget there's the perforating cancellers used on revenues, perf 12, too; some forger had to have found one.

Quote:I have long found that "If someone were to fake one, they likely would choose an imperf with better margins as a starting point" argument somewhat bogus. It gets used a lot for both postage coils and revenue part perfs. If I were faking these I would make a certain number of them deliberately off center for just that reason, most people would be inclined to think they are good, and I would rather have 20% of a very big number then 80% of a very small one.

I'm inclined to agree. Most good fakers (where "good" in this case means "frequently successful, and not caught out") know that something too good to be true will be passed, while something with at least a minor imperfection looks "realer" and might draw respectable bids.

A dealer friend once showed me a troubling item from his reference collection: a USA #2 that had a pen cancel removed, gum added, and then apparently was deliberately thinned. There wasn't any gum over the thin spot, and the regumming was a sophisticated modern job (transplanted period gum and artificial cracking!) so we don't think the damage was the result of a previous owner being careless with a hinge after the fact. But even with a small thin, an unused #2 with "original gum" will bring substantially more money than a sound pen cancelled copy...

There are very few Count Ferraries around, willing to throw large sums of money at anything that looks like a stamp, as long as it's a variety they have never seen before. Hence, there are fakers out there who will absolutely settle for a smaller return if they think it's safer and surer. I suspect they tend to be more successful for doing it, unfortunately.

I have seen stamps like that. With a serious but nearly invisible repair but then reperforated. There is a tendency among many collectors that if they find one problem they stop looking for other possibilities. That attitude is also why inexpensive coils and overprints have been faked as well. People will see that the overprints on the cheap stamps of a set match the overprints on the expensive stamps of the set and assume all are good when all are actually fake.

Trimmed off at bottom, too. This is the type of misleading cert that is one reason why I dislike PSE. Clearly three well known experts are calling it a fake, but obfuscation rules the day. None of these people have looked at revenues for PSE in about a dozen years now, they do everything in house and it has gotten much worse.

When I look at this stamp, I wonder sometimes if, hypothetically, the conclusion(s) reached by the experts at P.S.E. would be the same were this stamp to be currently listed in Scott, and to be a fairly common stamp. Would the margins still have been deemed "trimmed"?

Or is the ink color by itself enough to guarantee that this was a perforated stamp (at least at one point in time)?

The point of this exercise is to show that uncommon, part perforated stamps can still be fraudulently created from common, perforated stamps... even with giant margins at either end.

Quote:None of these people have looked at revenues for PSE in about a dozen years now, they do everything in house and it has gotten much worse.

I'm not sticking up for PSE - they don't deserve it, but isn't it true that the PF also does quite a bit in-house? I believe that to be true and feel it is at least one of the causes of the PF having it's own share of SNAFU's.

I do not know who does the revenue expertizing work for PSE. But on the PF, the first issues are looked at by Bart Rosenberg and Brian Bleckwenn. I can't think of anyone better on the earlier revenues.

Thank you Ron. Others look at them as well. For those who do not know, Brian Bleckwenn has collected first issue revenues exclusively for the past 55 years. He is also one of the most knowledgeable people on US stamps in the country.

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